The Dead Smartphone Tier List

38 Comments

1. I wish Ridge would also sell me just a new regular plate for my wallet. I don't need new elastic or internals or whatever but one of my plates is super scratched up so I'd love to not have to spend new wallet money to replace that.

2. The thing is you can get android to do the things you're thinking of the problem is in order to do that you would need to do a whole bunch of custom wacky things that LG didn't want to invest the r and d for

3. >Only Android
   Like poetry

4. I still have the Essential phone. Yes, it was an S tier.

5. The LG Wing remains my 2nd favorite phone of all time, next to my current Z Fold 4. Holding the phone 1 handed in gimbal mode while taking landscape photos and videos and having the controls at my thumb was great. So was watching a full screen video and having a/v controls on the small screen so I can adjust volume, brightness, and play/pause without having to touch the video itself. I love having it in the t-shape mounted in my car with maps on one screen for nav and music controls on the second screen. Not having the camera take up any screen real estate was fab, and it had a sensor where if you dropped the phone, the camera snapped back into the phone. You could also use the big screen as a controller analog for games running on the small screen if you held it upside down, it even had built in software to design and map your own controller. It was ahead of it's time and I wish more had come of that form factor.

6. One thing I took away from this was how small phones used to be and if red concentrated on the hydrogen ones camera and titanium build then it could of been better

7. Essential not only was the first to have a notch, it also has a titanium frame.

8. Microsoft Surface Duo is having a decent second life as an emulator. Pretty nice for DS.

9. I actually won a yellow Nokia Lumia 1020 about half a year ago in a fair.
   I was dissapointed to find out it's basically a paperweight in 2023, but it was also cool to find out about its history. (And yes, I kept it in a drawer for some reason.)

10. I have been daily driving my LG Wing for a few years now, I am absolutely not looking forward to replacing the phone despite it's minor quirks.

11. htc gets no love

12. Nextbit was bought by Razer, that's why the Razer phone looks like a Nextbit Robin.

13. In terms of the shape factor of the LG Wing phone – you should check out Japanese garake type phones (Galapagos phones) – some flip phones have that transformer T shape factor, so you 60+ guy can watch tv in the headphones while on the train to a business meeting in another city. They still have phone keyboards, but they can also have T shape flip screens like on that LG Wing phone.

14. Samsung Galaxy Beam
    Samsung Galaxy Round
    LG G Flex
    Asus Padfone
    HTC Evo 3D
    Essential Phone 2
    Yotaphone
    LG G5

    So many interesting ideas that were not mentioned. I'd really love to see some of them now in modern light

15. We really need keyboard phones back

16. Why no Palm Pre?

17. LG wing is definitely S-tier purely for its wacky meme factor design. It added features without compromising the smartphone part, unlike the other devices which went gimmick first then maybe added a smartphone to it if they felt generous enough.

18. Oh come on guys, the original Surface Duo has had two major OS updates since you looked at it. And you don’t seem to have applied either to your test phone. It works superbly now.

19. the 1020 would’ve done so much better if they made an android one.

20. If they made the Surface Duo the size of a Nintendo DS and cleaned up the software/touch issues – perfection, imo.

21. Palm Centro SS

22. Ah man Marcus is such a smug helmet

23. Hot take:
    – Windows phone UI was actually really good, even with all those tiles, it just lacked the app store to back it up
    – LG wing would be a great phone for DS / 3DS emulation.

24. The Surface Duo phones got a ton of updates and the Duo 2 was phenomenal. They tried it for a few weeks, ignored it ever since. And they forget it. The Duo 2 is pretty incredible. And they actually have updated it. A bad rating. This is why smaller YouTubers like Shane Craig are needed. Yes they are abandoning it, but it was a good phone

25. Got one thing wrong – the FlexPai is in its own super secret E tier 😅

26. It was a very fun bit to watch . Interesting .

27. Honestly im typing this message on an Iphone15 pro… and i will still choose my blackberry Bold over this piece of glass nonsense…

28. The Priv was not an AT&T exclusive. I worked at T-Mobile when it came out and we carried it. It also definitely deserves better than C tier. Both it and the LG Wing were A/B tier phones.

29. The LG wing and LG were underrated and never respected for their innovations. I think reviewers made them and broke them but their boot loop issues dinged their rep.

30. Sold them sharps crystal junk on boost mobile

31. My dad had a Lumia and that time it was 100% a S Tier phone

32. Blackberry Passport and Nokia N95 and Motorola Razr are the all time S tier imo.

33. I can see MKBHD got convinced by the battery life of the Ultra:)

34. Surface Duo was awesome and I wish we could get a Duo 3.

35. The Essential PH1 was the first phone I bought with my first paycheck after college. With the materials and the 360 camera, easy S tier!

36. I still have dreams about my priv. ph-1 was glorious until the battery took a massive isht

37. I will defend Windows Phone until the day I die.
    Best UI. Best useability. Best keyboard. Best camera during its time.
    I miss my Windows Phone every day and the iPhone and Android keep doing things that either annoy me or actively go against things I loved about my Windows Phone…

38. The ONLY S TIER devices imo: Essential Ph1 and Lumia 1020. Literally, the only thing that killed these devices from having an absolute larger impact/presence was backroom decisions. Windows Phone suffered from app development and Essential literally despite the names attached to company (Andy Rubin being cancelled), got zero carrier and market support.

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